Which sock and shoe do you put on first? What is your automatic response to the query, “How are you?” Where do you sit in Church? What section of the newspaper do you read first? I’ll bet you took only a second or two to answer every question. Although not as relentlessly as the animal kingdom where instinct takes its place, we are creatures of habit,
Habit makes living less complicated. If we had to make a decision on how to do every task with which we are presented, we wouldn’t function very well. So, we get up on the same side of the bed – of course with ‘dear one’ lying beside us, it would be difficult to do otherwise! We fix breakfast, dress ourselves, brush our teeth, and start the day with little thought to most of it.
Some habits are good, some are not so good. We can usually tell which. Well, we can if we think about it. Counselors who work with addictions tell us it takes three weeks to make or break a habit and if we can just hold out that long, our cravings will be under our control. Same goes with creating a habit. I guess that’s why New Year’s resolutions are broken pretty much every year. It’s hard to keep them for three days, let alone three weeks!
If you want to see how much a creature of habit you are take a simple act you perform each day and try to change it. I ran into this when I had to begin using a different computer. My old hard drive which, thank Heaven, was still intact, now sits in an exterior dock. How many times have I automatically clicked on a program only to remember it now takes three steps to find it? And when I had high-speed internet installed it took the whole three weeks to remember I did not need to run the cursor down to the dial-up icon and close it so we could use the phone line.
I guess hubby got tired of saying, “I’m fine,” to the greeting, “How are you?” so now he answers, “Almost perfect!” Those who know him well have come up with some quick retorts to that, but we’ll not go into them here. Sometimes we use the habit of saying, “I’m fine”, to mask our true feelings but most of the time we know the one who asks does not want to hear about our recent bout of flu or how our arthritis is keeping us up nights or what our kids are doing that really bugs us. It’s easy to tell when the greeting is an automatic gesture of societal politeness and when your friend sincerely wants to know how you’re doing. Perhaps habit is one of the things Alzheimer patients lose control of. Perhaps he or she can no longer count on familiar habits to give cohesion to life.
Yes, we are creatures of habit. That’s why it’s easy to play practical jokes on one another, for knowing our automatic response, the jokester can rig a situation where the response calls forth a completely unforeseen event. Creatures of habit we are and creatures of habit we will remain. But that makes us human. That makes us workable. Have a good week!
